First of all, a lot of this will be published off Beehiiv. I’ll post the links over here, but straight from the horses mouth and all. They just have easier options for sharing to social media, and I’m trying to make less of my life paperwork.
Tag: books
Nevill: Part 1
It’s been a long couple of weeks for me– my time and energy was focused on two things: getting through all of my doctors appointments and the teen. They are graduating from high school this year, and it feels like I’ve pulled out all my hair trying to counter their senioritis. The good news is I got a few more Nevill books read while in the waiting room, pulling. The bad news being the imminent baldness.
Banquet for the Damned: 3.5.
Dante is one half of the otherwise fractured hair metal band, Sister Morphine. The other half is Tom, a lothario who slept with the former drummer’s long-time girlfriend, as well as “stealing” and emotionally mistreating the woman Dante has a crush on, Imogene. Dante decides to participate in some good old escapism— with Tom in tow— and go to Scotland to work as a research assistant and complete a concept album with his idol, Eliot Coldwell. Coldwell is an old-school occultist who loves nothing more than lots of LSD and communicating with the dead.
When they get to St. Andrews, things aren’t as promising as they first appeared. Dante and Tom arrive as the authorities pull a dismembered arm out of the ocean. One of Coldwell’s previous research assistants committed suicide by lighting his entire car on fire with him inside of it. An American researcher is in town, drawn there by an increase in sleep terrors. The students who contact him are all tied to Coldwell in some way, and are losing their shit, sleepwalking, and then eventually vanishing. Coldwell alternates between a weird philosopher and decrepit drunk. And, most importantly, his remaining research assistant is probably possessed and feeding people to her old god sidekick. Academia, right?
I believe this was Nevill’s first published book, and I ain’t mad for it being a debut novel. There is background information– of the school, of supernatural phenomena, and of tying disparate stories together. It’s a story about witchcraft, its practitioners and what they unknowingly and knowingly call from the abyss. The characters even kind of find out shit is weird early on and have a justification for sticking around until it becomes unbearable. They know they’re outmatched. They want out of dodge. They try to get away. Most of them aren’t stupid, just afraid. Those who are skeptical have a good reason to be: they’re just having bad dreams under a great deal of stress of being post-grads or completely broke.
More in line with Nevill, it establishes the theme of humanity’s hubris when dealing with the unknown. It’s a strong basis for his work with invitations and how being the one extending the overture in no way guarantees control. In fact, it means the characters have lost their ability to be in charge the moment the “other” enters the scene. All thoughts of managing the unknown are folly.
Apartment 16: 3.
Barrington House is (in)famous. It has more than a little fuckery going on because people have never ever heard of closing the goddamned door. Seth is a starving artist. He’s employed as a security guard at Barrington House. Apryl is an American manic pixie dream girl in love with the past. Her aunt owned an apartment at Barrington House. There’s a weird kid and an absolutely negligent dead artist who can’t keep the paint brush or the, maybe literal, ghouls in his pants nor has he noticed the lease was up years ago.
Apryl inherits her aunt’s apartment in Barrington House, an uppercrust building in London that only the creme de la creme (and demons) can afford to live in. When she gets there, she’s more than a little surprised that her dead aunt had become a shut-in recluse and hoarder. She plays dress up, enjoys the crisps, and then digs into why her aunt went batty. Hint: Don’t play with demons, folks.
Meanwhile, Seth works security in the building to support his career as an artist. However, the building starts having a supernatural pest problem that draws him to Apartment 16. Even worse, when he finally makes the decision that this is a bad thing and he should get the hell out, he realizes he’s being haunted by an evil child and severe physical symptoms whenever he gets a certain distance from the building. He’s trapped with his worst nightmare: a creepy, malignant (aren’t they all?) adolescent in a hoodie.
This book is the more refined British sister/brother/haint relative of Cold Heart Canyon: trapped residents, terrible secrets, and lich phylacteries that masquerade as artwork. It did a good job of building up layers of WTF. I found some of the characters, such as the hoodie kid, tedious at first because they were trite, and I wanted to strangle the male main character for responding to “haunted building, weird dead artist, being hunted by a hooligan” with any action other than moving to the states.
The book then built on those tropes to become more interesting and horrifying. There’s no real attempt to explain what the artist tapped into, but it does explain why the residents and the building are the way they are, which somewhat satisfied my hunger for context. I was annoyed that these people couldn’t manage to just leave at the first sign of hoodie shenanigans and bonkers aunties— I’m told London has an excellent mass transport system for escaping asshole haints. However, I appreciate that freeze is a legitimate fear response when facing a kid and his ghostly patron.
The Ritual: 4.
Luke is having a moment. All of his friends either have marriages, actual professions, or various other ties to traditional success. Meanwhile, he’s fucked and resentful. But not proper fucked or proper resentful. That comes later.
He and his three friends– Dom, Phil, and Hutch— decide to take a weekend hike in the Swedish mountains, since it’s cheap and Luke is skint. However, early on physically unfit Dom screws up his knee and Phil injures his feet. Instead of following the path to the next town, which would take longer, they decide to take the shorter pathway through the nearby woods. As it happens, shortcuts are bad. Especially the ones that are marked with flayed and dismembered animal corpses. That’s the kind of shortcut that just screams, “Maybe take the long way” in red flags.
First off, it turns out the woods are full of trees, underbrush, and other things that just make it difficult to cut a straight path. They also contain dilapidated cathedrals with their foundations full of bones and pagan idolatry. Under the pressure of being hunted in both their waking hours and dreams, Luke finds out he may be a penniless slacker, but his friends are dissatisfied with their jobs, marriages, and lives. Mostly, they’re all pissed off at each other, their already fractured and dying childhood relationships falling apart as they disappear one angry white guy at a time.
Secondly, the woods also harbor some black metal artists/pretendy-time Satanists who are super into eating bats and sacrificing humans, an incredibly unhelpful elderly woman, little people in the attic, and something else that also likes eating humans. Luke is on his own by the time he figures this out, and the last part of the book is him trying to make an escape while everything else is going bonkers.
The tonal differences (dealing with the outdoors then a claustrophobic room) between the first and second parts aside, I liked it. I also watched the movie before I read the book though, so I had some interesting visuals to carry into my readthrough of it. The lack of information here, beyond brief exposition, also makes sense as these are just some random dudes going on a vacation somewhere pretty and not understanding the wildlife or locals. Nevill uses his favorite protagonist, an unlucky victim who flails at every opportunity to succeed, even when it literally leaves bleeding animals and people in trees (or poisons them or rattles plastic bags or fills the entire apartment building with sludge) to warn them to back off. It really is just Luke sacrificing his friends to learn a life lesson about the appearances and holding onto those and the past. Ancient forest bullshit might ensue.
Adam Nevill Deep Dive
I’ve mentioned it before, but here it is again: I love a good rabbit hole.
Given my neurodiversity, obsessive deep dives are the free spot on the bingo card. However, that also comes with a side order of having no short term memory. I either immediately put it on a list (and, sometimes, eventually even use those lists) because I do have good long term memory and recall, or I binge every source of media I can find until the author releases something else, someone mentions it on social media, and I start again because I’ve missed a bunch of their work.
With authors, I tend to be a binger and check out everything I can get my hands on from the library or the book store. Hell, sometimes I do it even if I think they are terrible, because there are few things my brain likes better than a hit of dopamine from good ol’ confirmation bias. I like being really firm in my opinion that I’m right and complete in that rightness, okay?
Nevill was another one of these rabbit holes— or fucked up barrows in his case. I’ve reviewed his work before in shorter reviews and included those with a few edits. During my final check for this piece, I found out there were five or six more, so I’m in the process of reading and including them. Thankfully, I put it in parts so I have some time.
Adam Nevill likes to tell stories where people violate basic tenets of dealing with the supernatural, the norms of not being a fuckwit are just thrown out the window, and people just let weird shit into their houses, apartments, or satanist dens. And that’s the basic summation of his work: brilliant ideas, lots of folk horror, unknowable antagonists.
It’s the unknowable antagonists— things that just exist because they always have— that irk me. Because existence itself creates a history. Black Mag or antlered giants are not in a vacuum, so where is their folklore? Part of that is on me: I’m good with cosmic horror. I understand some things just exist, and they do bad things without any explanation other than their existence. However, I read for the deep lore, and Nevill doesn’t often write it. It sucks, because I really appreciate his characters and settings, but I’m blueballing it through the end like a teenager watching porn static for some back story.
Anyway, over the next few months, I’ll be releasing my reviews for his books among my other projects. I plan on hitting his novels, novellas, and short story collections up, but I am not going to venture into collections by other editors that include him. I simply don’t have the time to get that far into collection books, because stupid me would read the whole thing and end up in weird book-land forever. Not the good one. The one where you end up mummified under your TBR pile after your cats had their fill.
Short Reviews
Welcome back! For those in the US, I hope you enjoyed the holiday, however you do or don’t celebrate it. Personally, we don’t celebrate the meaning so much as the opportunity to be together.
The household typically gets some additional days off, and we used to host a huge party the weekend after. The pandemic changed a lot of things for us, including our views on family/friendship and my partner’s introversion (he’s a 5-6 guest max person now). The party hasn’t happened in years. He also found his love of cooking during this time. We spend all day cooking with each other and occasionally the housemate and/or teen, invite a friend or two over, and then bemoan the huge amount of food we now have to eat over the next few days. This year was a traditional turkey, but in the past we’ve managed all sorts of experiments and first times. Thankfully, they’ve all turned out okay.
I skipped last week because of Turkey Day, and mulled over how I wanted to handle these shorter reviews in the future. Gods know my punctuation is doing all the heavy lifting to keep most of these to two sentences. They will still be short, but some may go longer or shorter depending on how I felt about the book, editing, or what I remember of it. I really should get to writing these while the memory is fresh, but it would cut into my reading time and that will not do.
Currently Reading: Blackwater by Michael McDowell
Wearing: Fox in the Flowerbed by Imaginary Authors. This is a hothouse floral perfume: overwhelming and heady when you first put it on, like walking into an estate greenhouse as everything is blooming. The jasmine sticks around, but eventually becomes powdery and more acceptable for something like a late night ball and ::gasp:: ankle showing. It’s one of the most traditional perfumes in their collection, which is appropriate for the Regency Era and some rich, catty, New York bitches.
Persuasion by Jane Austen*: 4. Anne Elliot was convinced as a young woman to break off her engagement to Captain Wentworth, and now it’s a decade later and he’s back— romance, shenanigans, misunderstandings! I actually liked this better than Pride and Prejudice, but it could be because the other story has been beaten to death in my mind.
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: 4. Fanny is poor with a million brothers and sisters, so her aunt’s family is magnanimous to take her in since they need someone to look down on. As she grows up, she experiences angst over her cousin’s lack of interest in her, despite a rich lothario being so into her he’s willing to redeem his wicked ways. God, I even created a map for this one and I don’t remember much of it. Austen is meant to be read in between other books, so maybe I can remember shit.
Answered Prayers by Truman Capote: 3.5: The narrator, a queer escort who services high society women, reveals information about the social circles he runs in and the women he meets. It’s more than a little based on Capote’s real life relationships with wealthy socialites, and the novel was abandoned after the third chapter made its way to the press, because, man, Capote skewered the women he was benefiting from. Then again, with that kind of money, maybe they could have been pulled back and made 100% bitchy asshole less of their personalities.
*I’m on a bit of a Jane Austen kick and doing some mapping work on the books. I want to map out the locations mentioned, find historical images of different types of dwellings, houses, fashions, etc, and put together a visual guide for each of the books at some point. I brought in things that were adjacent, like Gaskell’s book and other historical romances. You know the plot: plucky heroine, class politics, and steamy hand brushing. Surprisingly enough, this kind of stuff is useful for writing horror.
Two Sentence Reviews
Currently Reading: Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
Wearing: Nightflyer by Olympic Orchids Perfume. We’re dealing with a number of corpses this week, and this smells like the “good” dirt after a rainy day: primal, freshly turned, and— just shy of sickly— sweet and floral. It fades into more of the mineral notes, a little salty and musky. I don’t know if I would wear it out and about unless I waited until the initial sweetness faded or layered it something to turn that note a little less… fecund. Still, I love smelling like a bog witch getting a good burial done, and it’s perfect for a fall or spring day layered in-between skin, sweaters, and blankets while reading some PNW murder mystery.
The Return by Rachel Harrison: 3. Elise’s best friend disappears during a hiking trip, and she spends two years wishing for her back; when Julie finally makes her return, something wrong has happened to her, and it’s only exacerbated by the getaway the group of friends has to celebrate the miracle of her survival. I think I would get the hell out of dodge after the first couple of issues, as the book is red flag central and Elise being all “Nah, fam, I got this.” She did not have this.
Bones in the Basement by Joni Mayhan: 3ish. A first hand account of the hauntings at the S.K. Pierce mansion from previous home owners. I’m not even sure how you rate books like these: the writing wasn’t a complete mess, and it’s a decent resource book for writing things that go bump in the night.
An Inquiry into Love and Death by Simone St. James**: 3. A young woman leaves her privileged women’s college and travels to the small town her uncle died in to handle his affairs, chase ghosts and nazis, and bone down detectives. It’s very typical, which means it wasn’t not enjoyable, but it wasn’t anything I would get excited and nerd dump about.
**From what I’ve read of Simone St. James, she blends the beats of crime mystery with a supernatural force in every book. Best of both worlds if you’re a true crime lover who just wants a ghost to pop up and testify now and then.
Two Sentence Reviews (sometimes!)
Midnight in Austenland by Shannon Hale: 3. Suffering from the sting of her husband’s infidelity, their divorce, and his quick remarriage to his mistress, Charlotte runs off to a Jane Austen theme park (just a mansion and grounds with actors, really) to become a regency lady and find some fake love; unfortunately, there is a murder. It was fun, and a break between some longer Austen things I was (and will be reading) even if it wasn’t some funny and poignant regency commentary.
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid: 3.5: Billy Dunne and his band The Six really want to make it big, and Daisy is a talented and gorgeous song writer; the story loosely follows the volatile band dynamics as they negotiate love, anger, passion, and attraction. It’s very loosely based on the drama that was Fleetwood Mac and the oral history format makes it like reading an— admittedly long— Rolling Stones story.
Austenland by Shannon Hale: 3. Jane is obsessed with the Regency era and takes a trip to a special theme park where even real life resembles a Jane Austen book, so she gets it on (and on and on). I had read this after the sequel, which was the more interesting book as a murder mystery; it’s a standard romance using the Austen-trappings in a faux fairy-tale setting, but add some illicit and very naughty sex (even ankles were shown) to spice it up.
True Story by Kate Reed Perry: 3. A teenager has a blackout, and the trauma of what did or did not occur in that moment, and what other people make of it, haunts this teenager into adulthood as she tries to navigate how the truth is formed and what it means. I liked the idea of how we can fill in moments with information that’s just as traumatic as the action itself— how lack of knowing means anything can take its place.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*: 4. Lizzy is a firebrand and Mr. Darcy has 10k pounds per year; hilarity ensues. I think we all know most of these stories by now and Austen is nothing if not formulaic, even in one of her most well known novels; it’s funny and what you would expect from regency romance while giving a bird’s eye view into the social politics of the time.
Two Sentence (Sometimes) Reviews
We Spread by Iain Reid: 3.5. An elderly woman becomes untethered to the world she knows when her partner dies and, she can no longer live on her own; in her new, special, nursing home she becomes the artist she once was, but at some cost she can’t define. It is beautifully written, even if I think there’s something off about the conclusion, and like the previous book, you have to pay attention to every detail.
Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese: 3. This retelling of the Scarlet Letter, but if Hester was a real woman (in this case, a talented seamstress and maybe witch) and Hawthorn was, ultimately, a fuckboy. It didn’t have me hanging on the edge of my seat, and there was a bit of magical negro nonsense, but it was mostly an okay read.
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell*: 3.5. Molly is a physician’s daughter in ye oldie times, and has to go through the tribulations of her father’s second marriage, her step-sister stealing her love interest, and a rumor mill trying to ruin her reputation by romantically associating her with a creep of a man. It’s what I expected from this type of book, and I actually enjoyed a peek into the non-regency (wrong time) politics and social scene in a project otherwise full of it.
*I’m on a bit of a Jane Austen kick and doing some mapping work on the books, but it also meant I brought in things that were adjacent, like Gaskell’s book and other historical romances. You know the plot: plucky heroine, class politics, and steamy hand brushing. Surprisingly enough, this kind of stuff is useful for writing horror.
Two Sentence Reviews
River Woman, River Demon by Jennifer Givhan: 3. A traumatized woman must deal with her friend’s murder, her husband’s arrest for said murder, and her ex being back in town while also being magical. I had not remembered much about this book, so had to look it up; I remember having weird plot concerns, but it was a standard horror read.
Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott: 4. Siblings inherit two things from their distant relatives: a house on chicken legs and an unrelenting horror created and forged in the fires of past atrocities. I found this entire story to be just the right balance of humor, horror, and charm, and just the perfect fairy tale for a winter night (when is how far behind I am).
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid: 3.5. During a trip to visit her boyfriend’s parents, a woman contemplates ending the relationship, but as her feelings break down about her partner, weird things and coincidences start happening. I liked it, even if it required a lot of going back and rereading things for me, because every detail mattered in this “everything is not as it seems” story; just keep that in mind for your own read through.
Alma Katsu’s The Hunger and The Deep
History is fickle. We all know that, right? That the “facts” in our historical recollections at best belong to survivors of an event, in the middle belong to those relying on recollections and their own perceptions and observations, and at worst to those who achieved victory and rewrite their struggles to turn them into heroes. It’s all got some modicum of storytelling and fiction. Alma Katsu seizes this whole concept and then runs off with it to create some paranormal shenanigans.
To be transparent: I stumbled upon Alma Katsu’s books by accident. I had meant to check out Nick Cutter’s book The Deep, but when you mix the library app with sleep meds, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. So, I ended up with a book by Katsu.
The Deep is about the Titanic and the Brittannic in two timelines involving, relatively, the same people. The beginning of the book starts with a letter from a father to a sanitorium regarding his missing daughter, Annie Hebley. The doctor, in a rare moment for a physician at the beginning of the century, decides to leave the question unanswered out of respect for the patient’s privacy. Annie has been his patient for years, even though no one thinks anything is wrong with her. Her call to action is a letter from an old friend, one she met on the Titanic, regarding a position of a nurse aboard the once sister of the doomed ship, the Britannic. Encouraged by the hospital, she takes the position.
From there, the timeline switches between the Titanic and the Britannic. Annie, a servant to the first class on the Titanic, integrates herself with the culture and spiritualist conjecture of the rich, becoming entangled within their affairs and fearing their talk of spiritual possession. She also meets the husband of a wealthy woman and creeps on him for a bit, while everything else melts down on the ship and the inevitable happens.
That’s pretty much what happens on the Britannic as well. The man, who Annie was sure died on the Titanic, shows up as a wounded soldier on her new boat and having learned zero manners in the years since the disaster, she creeps on him some more and tells him of all the sexy things they did together. Of course, he remembers none of it. There’s a whole reason for it, and we already know the Britannic sank too. Chick is 0/2.
The Hunger also deals with a historical event, the Donner Party. I don’t think I have to rehash 90% of that. People go west. Rich people make poor leadership decisions. They get caught in the snow and start eating each other because long pork is better than dying of starvation. Except this time, the party is being pursued by something that likes eating everything below the skull of little kids, some people are acting bizarre and attacking others, and some of the more prominent historical figures (Tamsen Donner) may be witches or psychics or mediums or whatever.
I feel like I should like these books. I like history. I like ghosts. Hell, I even like the whole mysterious, possible-cryptid eating people. And yet, there’s something a little too precious for me in her writing, even as she describes cannibalism and vengeful spirits. And maybe I’ll still read her other stuff, because I have a morbid fascination with confirmation of trends and an abiding love of being happily surprised. It’s why I did a deepdive into Hester Fox, and despite never finding a deep appreciation for Fox’s work, I at least settled into a familiarity with it. I know I’ll pick up her newish one about the internment camps, even if her romantic-specific historic peeps-paranormal is kind of a little too…prissy? For me, at least, though I recognize that it’s a viable style and format for a lot of other readers so I still want to support the work.
Would I Read it Again?: No. The style isn’t my jam. I (probably) keep throwing myself at whatever else she publishes, but I don’t think I’ll be doing any rereads of old material.
Rating: A solid 3, and The Hunger pulled The Deep kicking and screaming there. Like I said, this is definitely for somebody, and it’s okay for whoever that person is. I have some weird issues around rewriting actual events, especially when they were such awful tragedies for those involved, but that’s my spider-filled brain trying to wrap itself around historical theory and how malleable it can be in fiction.
The Endings, The Endings AAAAARGH
An Interlude: I am chronically ill. It’s something auto-immune adjacent, if not dead on, that is exacerbated by some severe PTSD and fatigue that mean I’m always a tightly-wound ball of nightmares and naps. Because I don’t communicate like normal peeps (thank ND), doctors tend to think it’s not as bad as it is, even when it’s pretty damned bad.
My psychiatrist though? That guy? He’s a damned rock star. He looks at test results. He puts things together. He knows it’s a complicated history, I’m not looking for the hard drugs, and I just want to do things like be able to focus and sleep. I’ve lived with the pain for years. Same for the trauma. But as I age, my brain handles all of the non-voluntary functions with less and less grace.
Que the rock star. He put me on some sleep meds which allowed me to put a lock on my night time routine. I’ve gone from very poor to poor on the Likert scale of sleep. It’s insane. I have a modicum of energy. I deep cleaned and organized two whole rooms I haven’t been able to seriously work on for years.
All this to say: I’m sitting on my computer a little less. Reviews will come accordingly until I finish the backlog of household stuff I’ve had to let go. Ideally, as we adjust and find the perfect sleep med, I’ll get through all of that more quickly and still be able to apply my brain to writing, reading, and all of the art that comes with an overactive brain that can actually do the corresponding work.
Anyway, onto some books!
I can’t remember where I saw the list, but I think it was something to do with Bram Stoker award nominees and winners. Of course, I added that shit to my TBR pile like the internet was showering me with manna from heaven and not just presenting information in a useful way, because I love making lists that later crush me with how long they’ve unintentionally gotten. Reddit’s /horrorlit knows the game.
Two of the books on the list were Josh Malerman’s Malorie and E.V. Knight’s The Fourth Whore. And man, you would think a book about cosmic aliens driving you mad and another about how Lilith is trying to stick the landing on the whole apocalypse thing would vary vastly in terms of execution, but then you read them. And they’re both disappointments in very similar ways: both are about the end of the world as we know it and the endings are terrible.
Malorie by Josh Malerman: 3. With Malorie, Malerman is telling the story of what happens not in the immediate aftermath of a world-altering event, but ten or twenty years later. Once the children born into that world start becoming adults and the conflicts between those who were traumatized and those who’ve never known anything but this new normal arise. In a lot of ways, it’s about how some only know how to fight and others learn to adapt.
Malorie is trying to live her life by the fold, and her now teenage children want to break free from her vice-like hold on safety measures, especially her teenage son. Tom is a bit of a rebel, a dreamer, and an inventor, not unlike his namesake (which is mentioned a bajillion times). To add to all of their issues, they’ve finally found a safe space, she’s managed to keep those kids alive as a result, and life is as good as it can get when you’re bundled up for winter at all times, even the dead of summer. And then the census taker comes by with information to disrupt all of that, including tantalizing details for Tom, such as a new train that allows people to travel across Michigan in (relative) safety. So, they uproot their lives. And their mores. And maybe some values along the way.
Almost 90% of this book was building to what laid at the end of the train, including a conflict with a villain from the first book. The last 10% was trying to wrap up all of those details in a bow without any real climax. The book spent a huge amount of time going somewhere, then just abandons that for a final kill and “oh things are better now.” It made what was otherwise good storytelling up until that point feel like a wacky, inflatable, tube man stepped up to tell the final chapter of the story.
The Fourth Whore by E.V. Knight: 2. Trigger warning: there is so much sexual assault in this book. Lilith is on the warpath. She was betrayed by Adam. She was betrayed by her creator. She was betrayed by the one person she trusted after being left in the wilderness, and then he had the audacity to betray her a second time to “save” her from the demoness he helped mold her into being. So, she’s picking up “Whores” to complete her four horseman vibe, including a prostitute she wants to wage STD war and a women’s doctor she wants to sow discord. Then there’s our protagonist, Kenzi.
See, when Kenzi was a wee thing she saw the Angel of Death, Sariel. Sariel has also been banished from heaven, but only until he collects all of these demonic souls he’s in part responsible for: he’s the former lover who betrayed Lilith, boning her down and then letting his other angel friends throw her into a cave to be raped by demons for a millenia. Then, because he hates consequences, he seals her soul into a talisman that he carries around and eventually gives to baby Kenzi because “she reminds him of someone.” Kenzi gets into a literal drug war and somehow activates the talisman, releasing Lilith and becoming the demon’s replacement for Sariel.
The more I read the book, the less I liked it. Sariel groomed Kenzi from the time she was seven to be his beloved. He has set it up so he can always be her white knight, putting her through some shit for that to be true. Gross. He did the same thing to Lilith’s innocence, basically being a whiny, man baby about his feels while she was sexually assaulted into losing everything that made her human. And then the book makes him the hero, because Lilith should stop being so big-mad about God and Adam and Sariel. She should practice forgiveness. She needs to learn to let go. Deep breathe. Yoga. All that.
Fuck that noise. Lilith’s on the nose about most of what she says. When she’s being a bitch, such as killing some previous allies, she’s acting completely out of character. She’s acting like Sariel or Lucifer or one of the men, and that’s what makes her villainous. Yet, they get to be the heroes, including the disgusting angel who let the love of his life get raped for thousands of years by demons. He grooms his other great love, starting when she is seven, by white knighting and m’ladying up the place. The fact that Kenzi chooses her groomer, going so far as to die to save him, makes me gag. The fact that Lilith got left holding the bag as the “demoness,” one final time is a disservice to her. Kenzi should have told them both to stuff it it, made the fucking crow raise her dead boyfriend, and peaced out while Lilith ripped Mr. “I’m a Whiny Crybaby Pedophile” a new hole for him to shit out of.
I knocked off two points for that shit crap. I’m with Lilith. When men fail us, eat them alive. Always.
The Wuthering Cephalopod 